Coloring the Classroom
The Transformation of Teacher Demographics in Missouri. Interactive Power BI reports built on two decades of Missouri DESE educator data, and a professional-learning session in which participants explored the reports themselves.
What was built
Dr. Fields developed a set of interactive Power BI reports from more than 1.048 million rows of educator data published by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, covering the years 2003 through 2023. Each row is a record in the DESE dataset, not a unique teacher.
The reports allowed a viewer to move across the full 20-year span, narrow to a single school district or compare districts to the state, and look at the workforce through demographics, degree attainment, and compensation. Filters for year, district, race, sex, and highest degree applied across the views.
Rows of DESE educator data
Years covered
Report views: Main, Race, Sex, Degree, Compensation
The report views
- Year (2003 to 2023)
- District name
- Race
- Sex
- Highest degree
- Regular-term salary
- Extra-duty salary
- Total salary
How it was used
The reports anchored a session titled Coloring the Classroom: The Transformation of Teacher Demographics in Missouri, delivered on June 7, 2024 as part of a summer professional-learning day. The stated objectives were to analyze the 20-year trends in Missouri's teacher demographics, identifying patterns, disparities, and shifts in the composition of the educator workforce, and to examine factors contributing to the underrepresentation of teachers of color, including barriers in recruitment, hiring, retention, and advancement, and the impact of those disparities on student outcomes and school culture.
Rather than presenting conclusions, the session gave participants a set of questions to answer from the reports, then opened the reports for self-exploration. Participants investigated the data, compared patterns across years and districts, discussed what they noticed, and reported their findings back to the room.
The goal was not simply to show the data. It was to make the patterns visible enough for people to examine together.
A note on interpretation
The reports reveal patterns and disparities in the workforce data. They do not, on their own, establish why those patterns occurred. That distinction was part of the design: the analysis sharpens the questions, and the discussion does the interpretive work.
Data: Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Reports built in Power BI. Report access is available on request through the contact form.